What If People Only Had A Somatic Nervous System?

Somatic is the voluntary nervous system, the muscle / nerve sequences we can control.

If we only had the existing somatic system we'd die.

If everything done by the automatic nervous system was under somatic control instead, we'd have to actively do a lot of essential biological functions; it would literally overwhelm the high brain centres if we had to consciously think all the time how to:

move our diaphragms up and down to inflate/deflate our lungs
digest food
beat our hearts
blink every 10 seconds
blink in bright light
remember to shiver if cold
open and close the valves in our blood vessels
keep our body temperature even
dilate the aveoli in the lungs
constrict the eyes if too bright, or widen them if in a dark place
make sure the blood vessels dilate enough during exercise
excrete saliva
absorb nutrients
some sexual functions
etc.

If we had to consciously think of doing all that, we wouldn't have the energy to concentrate on stuff like learning to read and write, go see a film, get a job, go snowboarding, nothing!

There's so much that we have to learn, anyway, as babies. Things that do become semi-automatic: like walking, chewing, putting your hands out to break a fall, etc.

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